The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) focuses not on the war but on its aftermath, telling the story of how three combat veterans (played by Dana Andrews, Fredric March, and Harold Russell, a real-life soldier who lost his hands in the war) adjust to civilian life. Robert Sherwood’s movingly understated screenplay incorporates some of Wyler’s personal experiences during and immediately after the war. Billy Wilder spoke for most of Hollywood in calling it “the best-directed film I’ve ever seen in my life,” though it was not, as Harris claims, the object of “unanimous” praise. In a 1947 Partisan Review essay called “The Anatomy of Falsehood” that goes unnoted in Five Came Back, Robert Warshow condemned The Best Years of Our Lives for its “optimistic picture of American life….For every difficulty, there is conceived to be some simple moral imperative that will solve it, at least to the extent that it can be solved at all.”

As usual with Warshow, there was something to his critique of The Best Years of Our Lives. The film’s fundamental weakness is that for all of its closely observed realism, it remains at bottom a Hollywood romance in which all three principal characters appear at the end to be on the way to surmounting the obstacles placed in their paths by the war. But just as none of the film’s other critics objected to these variously plausible “happy” endings, so are most present-day viewers of The Best Years of Our Lives inclined to see it not as false but impressively frank, even mature, in its presentation of the psychic and emotional effects of war.

It happens that I’d never seen The Best Years of Our Lives on a screen. Indeed, I blush to admit that it’s been at least a decade since I last saw any studio-era Hollywood film in a theater. So Mrs. T and I went down to Film Forum yesterday afternoon and caught a matinée, and were knocked sideways by the experience.

To watch The Best Years of Our Lives in a theater is, among many other things, to be riveted by Gregg Toland’s deep-focus cinematography, which is so sharply detailed that you can actually identify some of the books on the shelves of the characters’ homes. (I was amused to see, for instance, that Al and Milly Stephenson owned the once-ubiquitous two-volume Book-of-the-Month Club edition of Remembrance of Things Past.) No less riveting is Hugo Friedhofer’s Copland-influenced musical score, which comes through so clearly at Film Forum that you can easily hear the occasional portamenti played by the Louis Kaufman-led string section of the studio orchestra.

I won’t pretend, though, that I paid attention to such minutiae for more than a reel or two. I soon got caught up in the film itself, in large part for the very good reason that I was viewing it not in my living room but on the biggish screen of a darkened theater, sitting among similarly absorbed strangers. Studio-era movies were made to be seen under just those circumstances, and it is only when you see them that way that they cast their proper spell, creating an all-enveloping collective experience that can be overwhelming.

Sure enough, I was overwhelmed all over again by of The Best Years of Our Lives. What’s more, I know I wasn’t the only person in the theater who felt that way, because I heard a fair number of my neighbors weeping. Truth to tell, it’s all but impossible to watch The Best Years of Our Lives under any circumstances without weeping, but seeing it in a theater heightened the film’s emotional intensity to a pitch that at times was close to unbearable.

“Why don’t we come see old movies here more often?” I said to Mrs. T as we left the theater.

“I don’t know,” she sensibly replied. “Why don’t we?”

Of course we both knew the obvious answer to my half-rhetorical question: because it’s infinitely more convenient to watch them at home, at a time of our own choosing. But I’m glad we finally got to see The Best Years of Our Lives the way it’s supposed to be seen—the way our parents saw it—and I hope we’ll remember how much the experience meant to us the next time Film Forum announces a screening of one of our old favorites.

* * *

For more information about Film Forum’s screenings of The Best Years of Our Lives, which end on Thursday, go here.

The climactic “aircraft graveyard” scene from William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, starring Dana Andrews. The score is by Hugo Friedhofer:

Whatever you think of James’s style–and I know that plenty of smart people go into sneezing fits when they even get into the same room with his books–I find it hard to believe that someone could read his work and think of his as a sheltered existence. The inner lives of so many different kinds of people are animated there: men, women, children, rich, poor, middle-class, bright, dim, kind, wicked, and so on. This curiosity, let alone his insight, didn’t come from simply sitting back and coldly observing life….

“A boy does not regard his books as part of culture; at least, boys of forty years ago didn’t. We went into them neck-high for fun and illusion. We did not distinguish between our authors and the way they transmuted their material. In later life, no doubt, the critical attitude to literature brings pleasures of a refined aesthetic order. But I doubt if they console for that lost first willing surrender to the author’s most simple and direct invocation—that is to say, if we are so unfortunate as to lose it at all.”

Neville Cardus, Second Innings

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, ran earlier this season at New Orleans’ Le Petit Theatre. It previously closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, … [Read More...]

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]